Scaramouche - Rafael Sabatini (comprehension books TXT) 📗

the impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed - by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing freely - Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.

The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte d’Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d’Artois - the royal tennis-player - had been amongst the very first to emigrate. Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen’s intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier - and there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children. Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany - where the nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France - had come to occupy in his brother’s absence the courtier’s handsome villa at Meudon.

That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants - for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou’s old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed - to the ceaseless and but half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M. Etienne had left - as his maitre d’hotel here at Meudon.

Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost had he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting him to the salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who would - in the words of Benoit - be ravished to see M. Andre again.

“Monseigneur! Monseigneur!” he cried in a quavering voice, entering a pace or two in advance of the visitor. “It is M. Andre… M. Andre, your godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here… and so fine that you would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is he not beautiful?”

And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight that he believed he was conveying to his master.

Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted to the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its festooned ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals. The door by which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the garden, were of an enormous height - almost, indeed, the full height of the room itself. It was a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis’ that if these people could only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better case.

The Seigneur - furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his surroundings - had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on the part of Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since their coming to Meudon.

“What is it? Eh?” His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the visitor. “Andre!” said he, between surprise and sternness; and the colour deepened in his great pink face.

Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned at Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent hostility on the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent old fellow discreetly effaced himself.

“What do you want here?” growled M. de Kercadiou.

“No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my godfather,” said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.

“You have contrived without kissing it for two years.”

“Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune.”

The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.

“Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether you were alive or dead?”

“At first it was dangerous - dangerous to my life - to disclose my whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and my pride forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must take of it, to appeal to you for help. Later… “

“Destitute?” The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip trembled. Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he surveyed this very changed and elegant godson of his, noted the quiet richness of his apparel, the paste buckles and red heels to his shoes, the sword hilted in mother-o’-pearl and silver, and the carefully dressed hair that he had always seen hanging in wisps about his face. “At least you do not look destitute now,” he sneered.

“I am not. I have prospered since. In that, monsieur, I differ from the ordinary prodigal, who returns only when he needs assistance. I return solely because I love you, monsieur - to tell you so. I have come at the very first moment after hearing of your presence here.” He advanced. “Monsieur my godfather!” he said, and held out his hand.

But M. de Kercadiou remained unbending, wrapped in his cold dignity and resentment.

“Whatever tribulations you may have suffered or consider that you may have suffered, they are far less than your disgraceful conduct deserved, and I observe that they have nothing abated your impudence. You think that you have but to come here and say, ‘Monsieur my godfather!’ and everything is to be forgiven and forgotten. That is your error. You have committed too great a wrong; you have offended against everything by which I hold, and against myself personally, by your betrayal of my trust in you. You are one of those unspeakable scoundrels who are responsible for this revolution.”

“Alas, monsieur, I see that you share the common delusion. These unspeakable scoundrels but demanded a constitution, as was promised them from the throne. They were not to know that the promise was insincere, or that its fulfilment would be baulked by the privileged orders. The men who have precipitated this revolution, monsieur, are the nobles and the prelates.”

“You dare - and at such a time as this - stand there and tell me such abominable lies! You dare to say that the nobles have made the revolution, when scores of them, following the example of M. le Duc d’Aiguillon, have flung their privileges, even their title-deeds, into the lap of the people! Or perhaps you deny it?”

“Oh, no. Having wantonly set fire to their house, they now try to put it out by throwing water on it; and where they fail they put the entire blame on the flames.”

“I see that you have come here to talk politics.”

“Far from it. I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of Montaigne’s. If I could make you understand… “

“You can’t. You’ll never make me understand how you came to render yourself so odiously notorious in Brittany.”

“Ah, not odiously, monsieur!”

“Certainly, odiously - among those that matter. It is said even that you were Omnes Omnibus, though that I cannot, will not believe.”

“Yet it is true.”

M. de Kercadiou choked. “And you confess it? You dare to confess it?”

“What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess - unless he is a coward.”

“Oh, and to be sure you were very brave, running away each time after you had done the mischief, turning comedian to hide yourself, doing more mischief as a comedian, provoking a riot in Nantes, and then running away again, to become God knows what - something dishonest by the affluent look of you. My God, man, I tell you that in these past two years I have hoped that you were dead, and you profoundly disappoint me that you are not!” He beat his hands together, and raised his shrill voice to call - “Benoit!” He strode away towards the fireplace, scarlet in the face, shaking with the passion into which he had worked himself. “Dead, I might have forgiven you, as one who had paid for his evil, and his folly. Living, I never can forgive you. You have gone too far. God alone knows where it will end.

“Benoit, the door. M. Andre-Louis Moreau to the door!” The tone argued an irrevocable determination. Pale and self-contained, but with a queer pain at his heart, Andre-Louis heard that dismissal, saw Benoit’s white, scared face and shaking hands half-raised as if he were about to expostulate with his master. And then another voice, a crisp, boyish voice, cut in.

“Uncle!” it cried, a world of indignation and surprise in its pitch, and then: “Andre!” And this time a note almost of gladness, certainly of welcome, was blended with the surprise that still remained.

Both turned, half the room between them at the moment, and beheld Aline in one of the long, open windows, arrested there in the act of entering from the garden, Aline in a milkmaid bonnet of the latest mode, though without any of the tricolour embellishments that were so commonly to be seen upon them.

The thin lips of Andre’s long mouth twisted into a queer smile. Into his mind had flashed the memory of their last parting. He saw himself again, standing burning with indignation upon the pavement of Nantes, looking after her carriage as it receded down the Avenue de Gigan.

She was coming towards him now with outstretched hands, a heightened colour in her cheeks, a smile of welcome on her lips. He bowed low and kissed her hand in silence.

Then with a glance and a gesture she dismissed Benoit, and in